Democratic states have only ever existed as an ideal – an abstraction more malleable than is often acknowledged and a form of government utterly incompatible with capitalism. ‘We must make our choice,’ warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis, ‘[w]e may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.’ There can be no compromise because between the two because the concentration of economic power is inherently undemocratic.

“There are known knowns; there are known unknowns; there are unknown unknowns; but there are also unknown knowns; that is to say, things that you think you know that it turns out you did not.” Donald Rumsfeld